Author : All posts by ilikesql

07

Feb

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-service-and-mobile-january-2018-feature-summary/Source: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-service-and-mobile-january-2018-feature-summary/ The Power BI service and mobile team is thrilled to kick off the first feature summary blog for 2018! With a new year in full swing, we’ve been hard at work on features READ MORE

07

Feb

Microsoft becomes the first hyperscale cloud provider to offer SAP HANA supportable VMs in the UK.

Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) customers can now take advantage of the Azure M/V3/B-series of VM sizes available in the UK South region. We’re also excited to announce that Azure is the first hyperscale cloud provider to offer VMs optimized for large in-memory workloads such as SAP HANA in the UK.

New Azure M series – The Azure M-series is perfectly suited for your large in-memory workloads like SAP HANA and SQL Hekaton. With the M-series, these databases can load large datasets into memory and utilize fast memory access with massive virtual CPU (vCPU) parallel processing to speed up queries and enable real-time analytics.

New Azure B series – B-series VMs provide the lowest cost option for customers with flexible vCPU requirements. These are useful for workloads like web servers, small databases, and development or test environments where CPU utilization is low most of the time, but spikes for

07

Feb

Azure Cosmos DB Graph API is the first cloud database to provide graph functionality over a globally distributed managed service. This has enabled users to explore new ways of consuming their data with the use of the Gremlin language while still benefitting from global distribution, elastic scalability in storage and throughput, guaranteed low latency, consistency models, and enterprise-ready SLAs of Azure Cosmos DB.

In December, Azure Cosmos DB Graph API became generally available. This release includes several critical updates to the performance and latency, as well as expanding the application platforms that can be used with it. Here is a brief recap of the features included in the general availability release of Azure Cosmos DB Graph API.

Increased service performance and stability

Several performance and stability improvements have been applied to the Azure Cosmos DB Graph API service. These updates benefit the Gremlin query processing performance, as well as the connectivity experience when using any of the open-source Gremlin connectors. Additional fixes were also applied to the previously known Gremlin error parsing issues that used to be experienced.

07

Feb

Today we are happy to announce performance upgrades to all paid service tiers in Azure Search. For the exact same price, these upgraded Azure Search services have roughly double the compute power of the previous hardware configuration that backed Azure Search. Additionally, services in the Standard tier began using SSD storage under the hood, compared to HDD storage used previously.

What does this mean for Azure Search?

With these service upgrades, we removed the document count limits from the Basic and Standard pricing tiers. This means that only storage limits are enforced in new Azure Search services. Depending on a scenario’s workload, these upgraded services may also benefit from faster indexing and querying performance at the same exact price points.

The Basic tier now supports an increase in the number of indexes from 5 to 15. Also in the Basic tier, Azure Search can now support up to 15 data sources and indexers per service. For the Standard 3 High Density pricing tier (great for multitenant scenarios), we were able to remove the 200 million document per partition limit, only enforcing per-index limits.

06

Feb

This post is authored by Chris Testa-O’Neill, Applied Data Scientist in the Microsoft Cloud AI team.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is proving to be a massively disruptive force, one that is leading to the digital transformation of businesses at a faster pace than most of us would have imagined. At Microsoft, our mission is to bring AI to every developer and every organization on the planet, and to provide the best platform and tools to make them successful. You can read more Microsoft’s approach to AI here.

In keeping with our mission, we are currently running a series of popular AI boot camps around the world. This post shares more information about these boot camps and provides links for you to access these materials and start building your own AI apps in a self-paced way.

Our bootcamps have two target audience profiles, the emerging AI developer and the professional AI developer, and our curriculum is primarily oriented towards these two personas. The first two days of the bootcamp are aimed at the emerging AI developer. The target profile here is an IT developer who is yet to use Microsoft AI tools and APIs to infuse intelligence into their business applications.

06

Feb

We are delighted to announce a new capability in Microsoft Video Indexer: Brand Detection from speech and from visual text! If you are not yet familiar with Video Indexer, you may want to take a look at a few examples on our portal.

Having brands in the video index gives you insights on names of products and organizations, which appear in a video or audio asset without having to watch it. Particularly, it enables you to search over large amounts of video and audio. Customers find Brand Detection useful in a wide variety of business scenarios such as contents archive and discovery, contextual advertising, social media analysis, retail compete analysis and many more.

Out of the box brand detection

Let us take a look at an example. In this Microsoft Build 2017 Day 2 presentation, the brand “Microsoft Windows” appears multiple times. Sometimes in the transcript, sometimes as visual text and never as verbatim. Video Indexer detects with high precision that a term is indeed brand based on the context, covering over 90k brands out of the box, and constantly updating. At 02:25, Video Indexer detects the brand from speech and then again at 02:40 from visual text, which is

Feb

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/connect-to-tens-of-thousands-of-datasets-on-data-world-with-the-new-connector-for-power-bi-desktop-and-join-the-webinar/Source: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/connect-to-tens-of-thousands-of-datasets-on-data-world-with-the-new-connector-for-power-bi-desktop-and-join-the-webinar/ Late last year as part of the December Power BI Desktop release, we launched a new connector for data.world – aka the social network for data nerds. data.world is a platform where people READ MORE

05

Feb

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-february-2018-feature-summary/Source: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-february-2018-feature-summary/ There are two themes for this month’s Power BI Desktop update. The first is a focus on some of your major asks including multi-selecting data points across multiple charts and syncing slicer values READ MORE

05

Feb

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/2-6-webinar-flow-with-microsoft-graph-api-by-ashish-trivedi/Source: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/2-6-webinar-flow-with-microsoft-graph-api-by-ashish-trivedi/ In this webinar, we cover what is Graph API and how it can provide information and intelligence from Office 365.

05

Feb

Last week in Azure, Azure Event Grid, a fully managed, scalable and flexible event routing service became generally available. Event Grid enables you to build reactive, event-driven apps with a fully managed event routing service using a publish-subscribe model to connect data sources and event handlers, automate operations, and integrate applications.

In addition, Ansible is now pre-installed in Bash in Cloud Shell. Ansible is an open-source product that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, and application deployments. By using Ansible, you can provision virtual machines, containers, and cloud infrastructures. You can also use Ansible to automate the deployment and configuration of resources in your environment.